Thanks for all these interesting (and much more encouraging!) info: a month of photographed files sounds a lot better than my previous fears.

As my keen interest is Venlo A/F in WW-2 in general and the history of the I./NJG 1 and other units operating from 'my' airfield in particular, I can focus on NW-Europe and Germany I guess, thus speeding up the photographing.

If I have grown up (an unlikely prospective) I will write a book about this I./NJG 1.

[quote=Jim Oxley;93249] Any idea why the card index would have been destroyed? Surely not for security reasons.[/quote]

There were rumours that the card index was kept in a basement at the Admiralty (and other locations were also suggested). If so, it is probable that it was destroyed at a later date. As far as I can find out, there ts no reliable 'paper trail'.
Churchill was quite clear in his instructions to protect the existance of ULTRA at all costs which ultimately is at the heart of our research problems today. It also gave problems to the Intelligence establishment in the 1950s as the best of the analytical equipment (including Colossus) had been destroyed in the same spirit. The details and references contained in the card index was a 'smoking gun' piece of evidence that the Allies were able to read machine encrypted radio/teletype messages and that was as big an issue in the Cold War as it had been in the Second World War. We now know that the secret was out, but that is hindsight.

Any idea why the card index would have been destroyed? Surely not for security reasons.

Back in the 1980's I corresponded with the then director of the Air Ministry's Air Historical Branch (AHB) as well as with Professor Ralph Bennett, a retired wartime Bletchley Park veteran and Cambridge University professor and author who penned several books about the use of ULTRA in Normandy and in the Mediterranean. They both independently told me the same story, three years apart: the Air Index of some 300,000 large, multi-sided index cards was never copied or microfilmed and immediately after the war it was removed to a protected underground facility on the campus of Oxford University until 1948, at which time it was destroyed. Neither gentleman chose to elaborate beyond this simple explanation.

Was this an alibi they were given by the security people and ordered to repeat if asked sensitive questions? Perhaps, but the ULTRA secret had already been in the public domain for 14 or 15 years when I wrote to them, so probably would not have felt it necessary to conceal the truth any longer. But you can make the call.

What a shame, huh? What a marvelous historical resource the Air Index would have been because it would have allowed the researcher to go directly and immediately to a card or two covered his/her topic of interest and review each and every ULTRA intercept that applied to that topic, whether it be an aircraft, unit, place, person or what have you.

[quote=Larry deZeng;93267]Was this an alibi they were given by the security people and ordered to repeat if asked sensitive questions? Perhaps, ...[/quote

]

I agree exactly with your assesment. ULTRA was not the only intelligence asset that was being protected: the sophistication of Allied SIGINT as a whole, including the contribution of ULTRA material, was immensely sensitive and the UK/US collaboration in the early post-war period was balanced on a knife-edge as the differing priorities were emerging. Mainly due to the pressure to hold together the Empire, Britain’s intelligence community was making the most of her position as a base for US involvement in the coming confrontation with the USSR, and SIGINT was still growing as an industry. There was quite a bit of ‘political football’ on the subject and Britain, wrongly, thought that her strength in SIGINT was going to keep her place at the top table. It was of course too late, due to the actions of the Soviet moles in British Intelligence, but it took until the Suez Crisis for this to be accepted.

The card indexes were greatly detailed accounts of a defeated enemy, and evidence of the methods used to achieve that victory. The separate card system created and maintained by the Admiralty Submarine Tracking Rooms contained even more insights into the sources used, and apparently was cross-referenced to the GC&CS cards on many subjects. We would all do backflips now to get even a piece of that gold, but in the early ‘50s they must have been seen only as liability.

ULTRA was not the only intelligence asset that was being protected: the sophistication of Allied SIGINT as a whole, including the contribution of ULTRA material, was immensely sensitive and the UK/US collaboration in the early post-war period was balanced on a knife-edge as the differing priorities were emerging.

Nice analysis, Bruce, and right on the mark. I know. I was an insider. I graduated from the U.S. Army Southeast Signal School at Fort Gordon, Georgia, in April 1960 with MOS 722.10 (Cryptographer), was assigned to the White House Army Signal Agency (WHASA), then to the Department of the Army Cryptographic Branch in the Pentagon and for the next 4 years I worked with both on-line and off-line cryptographic systems. I continued in that and related fields until I left the service in late 1968. While at the Pentagon in particular, I was exposed almost daily to the operations of the ASA, USAFSS and the NSG, which were all mission-tasked by the NSA. The UKUSA signals intelligence relationship was a most sensitive one that we were constantly aware of, especially in the context of what could be shared and what could not. It was in the mid-1950's, I believe, that this relationship began to fray a bit around the edges, perhaps at the time of the Suez Crisis. Some things were withheld from us and, possibly in retaliation, the U.S. developed the NOFORN (No Foreign Dissemination) handling instructions for classified material at about that time. So it could well be that the Air Index tale I was told was just that: a tale.